Matthew 4:1-11

We heard the sermon text earlier, from Matthew’s Gospel. Immediately after his baptism, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”

The central word in this text is temptation. Fred Craddock, to whom I owe much in this sermon, says in almost any group you could assemble, if you sat down and said, “Well, folks, today the subject is temptation,” there would be a lot of nudging of each other and winking at each other. Someone might quote Oscar Wilde, who said, “I can resist anything but temptation.”

Then somebody would tell about something they did once that was mischievous, like playing a really funny prank on somebody else, and then saying, “The devil made me do it!” Somebody might tell of waking up some morning when it was dreary and drizzling rain, and giving in to the temptation to pull up the covers and say, “I’m not going to work, or I’m not going to school, or I’m not going to church, I’ll just sleep in.”

Someone else might tell about being in a restaurant, having a nice meal, when the waiter came around with the dessert cart, saying, “This is German chocolate cake, this is key lime pie, this is pecan pie, and this is a cherry cheesecake.” That prompted the response, “Whew! Get thee behind me, Satan!” And then, “Well, I don’t know, well, maybe this time, what do you think? We can divide one. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this time, since it’s a special occasion. It’s so tempting.”

The subject is temptation. Someone else takes it to a slightly different level, not quite as funny. She says, “My best friend’s family was going down to the beach for a long weekend, and they invited me to go along. It meant I would miss school on Friday and on Monday, but I wanted to go. What was I going to do? What was I going to say to my teachers, ‘Oh, I’m going to the beach’? So she says to her teacher, “My grandmother is having surgery, and we have to go.” So she has a good time at the beach, and in the cafeteria on Tuesday she is telling all her friends about it, and they are laughing, and one of the teachers comes by and asks, “How is your grandmother?” “My what? Oh, my grandmother! She’s going to be all right.” Everybody is holding their breath. The teacher moves on, and the girl says, “Wow, I got away with it!” But as she starts down the hall to class, she isn’t feeling very good.

Somebody gets even more serious. The test in college was very important, the biggest test of the semester. “I didn’t know all the material as well as I should, so I put all the answers on a tiny piece of paper and put it in my pocket. I had not decided yet to actually cheat, but all through the exam my mind was on that piece of paper. The answer is on that piece of paper! Shall I get out the piece of paper? I mean, there’s a big difference between passing and not passing, and the answer is on that piece of paper.” Temptation. It’s getting more serious.

A man gets his check on Friday afternoon, and on the way home from work he stops and has the check cashed. He says to himself, “I want to be able to give my wife some money so she can go to the store and get some groceries.” But he knows that on the way home he will pass a casino. “I could take more money home than I have right now if I go in there and get lucky.” With that cashed check he walks back and forth in front of the casino.

Someone else talks about how serious temptation was with a former addiction. Then somebody talks about a past experience of almost giving in to marital infidelity. Maybe there’s even someone there with an Enron-type story.

It’s all about temptation, from the dessert cart onward, but there are certainly different levels of seriousness. There are so many ways that we can be tempted!

Sometimes we are tempted to do something that is basically good, or appears to be good, something that sounds right. But we think maybe that if we did it, we’d be doing it for the wrong reason. Or we start asking ourselves if the end really does justify the means.

Our text is about the temptation experience of Jesus in the wilderness. The New Testament says that Jesus was tempted in all the same ways we are tempted. (Hebrews 4:15) We don’t know about all of his temptations, but the Gospel writers tell us what happened in the wilderness. This was between his baptism and the beginning of his public. Fred Craddock says Jesus was “still wet” from his baptism when he had to face the devil in the wilderness over what kind of Messiah he was going to be.

Craddock also says that we shouldn’t let the way the story is told throw us off. We shouldn’t make it into a cartoon, he says, with the devil standing over there and Jesus standing over here. The devil says this and Jesus says that. Don’t make it a picture where you draw Jesus standing on one side and another figure on the other side with a pitchfork and a red tail. We have to be careful, or we make it something less than temptation.

Dr. Craddock, who has taught me so much, says: “Even a fellow as weak as I am, if the devil came looking like a devil, I could say, ‘Hey! Here comes the devil. Give me your best shot.’ I could handle it. It is when I do not know the difference between what I am think and what the devil is thinking that it gets sticky.” He says that if he were drawing a picture of this text, Jesus would be the only one in the scene. He would not be alone, but all we could see would be Jesus.

Look, too, at how reasonable the temptations were. They sound like temptations to do good things. Listen to the devil. “Why don’t you turn these stones into bread?” That’s reasonable. He was hungry. Forty days in the wilderness is a long time. And he was the Son of God. The devil could say: “After all, you’ve never worked a miracle. You’d better try one out here in the desert. You might get embarrassed when you are in front of a crowd. Give it a try.”

The devil said: “Here’s a good idea. Jump off the pinnacle of the temple. Scripture says God will protect you. You won’t get hurt. And, if you did that, it would make a lot of people believe.” See? It makes sense.

The tempter showed him the kingdoms of the world, and said, “These are your . . . these are yours, if . . .” And wouldn’t it have been wonderful if Jesus had said yes and had gained more influence over the social and political orders of this world? I mean, a little more justice and fairness and equality in the world sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? It makes sense.

The point here is for us to see how subtle and insidious temptation is. Jesus is approached and tested at the point of what is reasonable, what is helpful, what seems good.

Real and serious temptation is not about the question, “Would you like to do something wrong?” When Adam and Eve were in the garden, the voice of the tempter didn’t say: “Would you like to live like the devil? I’ve got some drugs and crime waiting for you!” The tempter said, “Would you like to be as God?”

I think you can make a case for saying that this is the only temptation. We say: “Poor us, there are so many temptations in this life! There’s everything from delicious chocolate to Enron greed.” No, there are so may ways of being tempted. But there is only one temptation.

What is that? It is the temptation to play God. It is the temptation to play God instead of trusting God.

This was Jesus’ dilemma. The devil was saying: “Look, there are better ways of doing what you were sent here to do. There are more creative and more effective strategies. It all accomplishes the same purpose. And it all makes perfect sense.”

And at every point Jesus said, “But it amounts to playing God instead of trusting God.”

On turning the stones into bread, Jesus said, “We’re not to live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” On the spectacular leap from the pinnacle of the temple, Jesus said, “The scriptures say we are not to put the Lord God to the test.” On gaining the kingdoms of the world by bowing down to the devil, Jesus said, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'”

All of the ways we are tempted boil down to only one temptation. It is the temptation to play God, to play God instead of trusting God.

Even the temptation of chocolate cake? I am playing God when I yield to the temptation to eat something I shouldn’t eat? You’ve got to be kidding!

But isn’t it true? We know about the relationship of actions to consequences. We know how life is put together. In the world of God’s creation there are dependable principles, and boundaries, and rules. We say to our little children, “Don’t go in the street.” And you know why we say this. But the little rebel inside the child may try to defy the way the world is and the will of the parents. It’s a foolish thing, and can be perilous, to try to play the parent when you’re just the little child.

What makes things wrong in the first place? Is God simply trying to deny us what we want, what would give us pleasure? Is God being arbitrary and a little bit cruel? Or is God actually loving us, and trying mercifully to protect us, and seeking to guide us toward the true fullness of life?

Imagine that your personal world is a circle. A circle, of course, has a center. Life will simply not work, at least it will never be experienced in its fullness, if we put ourselves at the center and relegate everything else to other parts of the circle.

From the beginning, the Bible makes it clear that human life can be what it is intended to be only if God is allowed to occupy that center position. When God is the Lord of our lives, everything else begins to find its proper place.

The Danish theologian Kierkegaard pointed to the Genesis account of Abraham taking his son Isaac up the mountain to make a sacrifice of him, as God had told him to do. Of course, on that mountaintop Abraham discovered that what God really wanted was obedience, trust, and fidelity . . . not the death of his child. But Kierkegaard said that faith begins in infinite resignation, and then goes beyond that to trust God to the point of absurdity.

In our self-help, do-it-yourself culture, we have a strong attraction to the idea of saving ourselves, . . . self-salvation. Baron von Munchausen, the celebrated liar, once told of falling into a bog. When he had sunk up to his neck, when the situation seemed desperate, he said he simply grabbed his own hair and pulled himself out of the bog. That’s not much more ridiculous that some of our attempts to do it all ourselves, to do what only God can do, to play God. Self-salvation is a misguided idea. We cannot save ourselves.

Go back to the child. You know there is usually going to be trouble when a little child says, “I want to do it myself.” That’s o.k. when children are learning to do things they can and should do for themselves. But if a four-year-old decides to make pancakes without adult supervision and assistance, the kitchen may end up having to be remodeled!

One way of understanding sin is to see it as allowing anything other than God, anything, to occupy the center of your personal world, even if it is a very good thing. And we are trying to learn today, from Jesus’ wilderness experience, that we may be in greatest peril when we are tempted to do something that seems from all angles to be good.

Trust is both the easiest and the hardest thing we are asked to do. Trusting God, I’m saying, is both the easiest and the hardest thing we are invited to do. We want to do it ourselves. We think we need to do it ourselves, that we’re supposed to do it ourselves, in order to prove ourselves. We’re convinced we have to earn Momma and Daddy’s favor, and the world’s favor, and even God’s favor. But all we’re asked to do is trust.

This is why humility is so important. Humility doesn’t mean to be down on yourself, or to feel bad about yourself. It’s not a lack of self-esteem. Humility is the spiritual maturity to make the proper estimate of yourself.

Who am I? I am not God. I am good, created in God’s image. But true humility amounts to letting God be God. It means to say no to the great temptation to play God instead of trusting God.

Dean Inge said: “God promised to make you free. God did not promise to make you independent.” Paul Tillich, in his monumental Systematic Theology, traces the predicament of the world to human pride. Not legitimate pride in one’s work or one’s heritage, but a false pride in one’s efforts to manage one’s own life. Self-salvation, says Tillich, is “the great tragedy of religion.”

What results from true humility? What happens when we trust God instead of trying to play God? What happens? Grace. Grace: the unearned, undeserved, unconditional love and acceptance of God. Amazing grace.

“Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton. He was qualified to write it, too! Newton was a slave trader, and engaged in all the cruelty and inhumanity that such a monstrous, demonic business involves. After his conversion to faith in Christ, he became a minister, and then joined William Wilberforce in the fight against slavery. But he never forgot what his life was like when he played God. When he wrote, “that saved a wretch like me,” they were words from his heart.

Bill Moyers’ wonderful documentary film on the hymn includes a scene from Wembley Staudium in London. Many musical groups, mostly rock bands, had gathered to celebrate the dramatic changes in South Africa. The opera singer, Jessye Norman, concluded the evening.

Here is this impressive African-American woman in African dress. No backup musicians. She stand alone on the stage. The crowd becomes restless. Few, if any, recognize her. Someone cries out for more Guns ‘n’ Roses. Jessye Norman begins to sing, alone, a capella, slowly: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me! / I once was lost but now am found — / Was blind, but now I see.”

A remarkable thing happens. Silence falls over the turmoil in Wembley Stadium. By the time she reaches “T’was grace that taught my heart to fear, / And grace my fears relieved,” she has them entranced. When she comes to the third stanza, “‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, / And grace will lead me home,” several thousands are singing, the old hymn seeming to stir up something we all know deep within, but something we all forget.

There is only one temptation, really. It is the temptation to forget that God must be allowed to be God, or life becomes and remains a wilderness.

http://ccc5425.homestead.com/files/The_Only_Temptation_02_17_02.HTM